Month: October 2009

In this week’s episode of South Park, three of the boys play Rock Band. This in itself is kinda cool but then add the fact it’s Cartman singing to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face, well that’s just plain awesome.

During one of the times that the repair company was over to assess the damage to my ceiling, they sent someone new that I hadn’t dealt with before. When he arrived at my apartment, I casually mentioned, “The scene of the crime is right over here.” When I said that, I was really referring to the bathroom. Of course, I meant it metaphorically since there had been no actual crime committed when my ceiling got all wet.

After the guy left, I then remembered that the dude worked for a company that actually cleans up crime scenes. So while I was just joking, I’m almost positive that dude has done assessments of real crime scenes to estimate the amount of work to clean it all up. So it’s no wonder he seemed to find my situation a very minor repair job. I wonder what type of stuff he’s seen.

As a male who is in touch with his emotions and his sensitive side, I don’t feel any shame in admitting I have shed a tear, perhaps even two, while watching a motion picture. For many dudes of my age range, I don’t think this is very uncommon. For my generation, lots of males first cried at a movie when Optimus Prime died in Transformers: The Movie. I hope I didn’t spoil that for anyone. Though I actually didn’t cry when I saw Optimus give up the Matrix of Leadership, there were certainly a few movies I saw that tugged at the heartstrings of my blackened heart. Coincidentally, there are a few Internet movies that have also made my penis cry but let’s not talk about that right now.

So stay with me as I tell you this anecdote that involved a friend of mine. My friend Lafawnduh went to see one of the Harry Potter movies in 2004. I think it was the one where he gets his driver’s license or something. Anyways, when the movie let out, she went to loo. While at the sink, she saw a whole gaggle of ladies enter the washroom with tear-stained faces. Since the wizard movie she saw wasn’t that sad, she surmised these women had seen some other film, perhaps Alien vs. Predator. It turns out that in between sobs, a girl informed Lafawnduh that it was actually The Notebook which had caused all these ladies to weep uncontrollably at the end.

When Lafawnduh told me that story, I was intrigued. Could I resist the emotional story told in The Notebook? It got even more interesting as the years passed as the film garnered a reputation for being a tear-jerker.

It wasn’t until tonight that I finally watched The Notebook. The last scene came and went, and I found myself on my couch… wondering if I should eat that grapefruit in the fridge today or tomorrow. I didn’t feel like a shedding a tear one bit. Tear-jerker? Not for me at least and I’m a sucker for all the cliche stuff. If you haven’t seen the movie, you might wanna stop reading here because I’m about to lay down some serious spoilers.

Yes, I thought the movie was quite good. I can see why those two crazy Canadian kids became a real life couple for a few years. It was touching in a few parts but not to the point where I thought I was gonna weep. Don’t get me started on the end though. I’m supposed to believe they just died in their sleep while holding each other? Come on! That was so cliched that it wasn’t sad, it was just cliched. I wouldn’t have been surprised if some guy came on and said, “Damn, and he was just two weeks from retirement!”

In summary, a good movie but it didn’t even come close to making me reach for a tissue. Please, if you just thought of a joke to make, write it in the comments.

In a post I wrote a few weeks ago I outlined my endeavour to go as long as possible without wearing my winter coat. It really makes no sense to do so as any logical person would wear as much clothing as required to keep comfortably warm. As I am prone to fits of illogical behaviour, that means I’m still wearing hoodies and such outside.

I’ve decided to expand upon my personal stunts, though still heat related. I’d like to see how long I can go without turning on the heat in my apartment. Now, here’s the interesting part. I’ve never turned the heat on in my apartment. I moved into my place when spring was in full bloom so heat was not required back then. Do you think it’s possible for me to go the entire winter without turning on the heat? Last year, I made it as far as the end of October before I had to relent but that was in my previous abode.

The coat thing is kinda stupid but this apartment heat thing is a tad more beneficial. The less the heat is on, the less my electrical bill is. As with anything, larger goals are best achieved by breaking it down to smaller ones. I should concentrate on getting to the end of October without turning the heat. Then it might be the month of November… and so on!

By the time you read this, the web hosting service known as GeoCities will have ceased operations. If you have been using the Internet for a decade or more, you will understand what GeoCities meant to the beginnings of mainstream Internet use.

In mid to late 1990s, it wasn’t all that easy to get web hosting. If you were a university student and a bit lucky, your school might have set aside some server space for personal student web pages. If you weren’t a university student, things were a bit more difficult. Then GeoCities came along.

GeoCities was one of the first and most memorable web service to offer people, anyone, the ability to host pages on the Internet. If you were a fan of kittens and wanted to post your pictures of your kitties on the Internet, then GeoCities would allow you to do that, all for the price of free. Pretty soon, there thousands upon thousands of personal web pages on GeoCities, allowing normal, average people to express their thoughts and ideas to millions of others on the Internet.

The offering of free web hosting really showed people they could add to the Internet and not just consume what was already out there. In that sense, GeoCities will always have a place in Internet history.

The other thing that GeoCities was known for isn’t as impressive. If you were on the web in the late 90s then you already know what I’m talking about. I’d guess that 90% of the pages hosted by GeoCities looked like crap. It was great that everyone now could be on the web but it soon became clear that almost everyone knew nothing about web page design or what looked good.

Over the years, there were several GeoCities web page cliches that developed. First, there was the gaudy background image that seared itself into your brain. The image usually was so loud, it prevented you from reading the text on the page. Then there was the overuse of the “blink” tag. Some people made almost every other word on their page as blinking. Let’s not forget the random images that people would place all over their pages. Stuff like badges indicating it was Yahoo’s site of the day for December 14, 1998. Who could also forget the pile of broken image icons all over a page? This is where people either didn’t know or didn’t realize their img tags pointed to non-existent image files. Let us then remember blue text links. Back in the day, almost every single link that was text was coloured blue because that was the default and no one really bothered to change it. I could go on about “under construction” images and animated gifs but I’ll just stop right here.

Despite how bad GeoCities web pages were, it got people to contribute to the Internet. It allowed people to share their views to the rest of the world. In an age where Facebook, Twitter, and blogs are now refined forms of Internet expression, GeoCities was the raw beginning.

Yahoo!, who bought GeoCities a few years ago, is shutting it down today. There will be no official archiving of GeoCities pages but there are small groups out there who have been working for months to save as many pages as they can. Good for them for trying to save a bit of history.

Last but not least, web comic xkdc is commemorating the closing of GeoCities with this comic. It’s amazing how far we’ve come.

I’ve had to work late every night since Monday. As we’re in Burnaby now, we usually have to get our OT dinners from the cafeteria. Since the cafeteria in the past has been mainly geared up to feed the sports teams on their schedules, they have no idea how to feed a game team that doesn’t ship a game in September or October.

As an example of this, the dinner menu has been the same for four nights in a row. The choices are either mac and cheese or chicken and ribs. We had Boston Pizza delivered on Wednesday night but nothing on their menu looked good… except for the ribs. So while it my choice to eat ribs again on Wednesday, I’ve had ribs for dinner every night for four straight nights.

I can almost guarantee the menu will be the same again on Friday night.

Tonight the Vancouver Canucks played the Chicago Blackhawks in their first ice hockey match since their bruising, hard-fought second round playoff series last spring. In that contest, Vancouver goalie Bobby Lou had the performance of his career, letting in seven goals.

Going into tonight’s game I fully expected the Vancouver team to lose as they had not won on the road this season and lost their previous game in Edmonton. My prediction seemed to be correct for about two-thirds of the game as the Canucks were down 2-1. Then something happened which you can see for yourself below:

After all that, the Canucks surprisingly came back to score two straight goals to win the game. I honestly hope Toews is alright since he might make a good additional to the Canadian Olympic team.

One of the things I viewed as a positive when I saw my apartment for the first time was the inclusion of basic yet stainless steel appliances of a cooking, cooling, and cleaning variety.

Now with my refrigerator, up until very recently, I just used it to cool and freeze my food. As some of you know, the large outside surface area of a refrigerator allows you to use it for other purposes, namely the posting of flat materials likes photos, crayon drawings, coupons, and report cards. When I moved in, I didn’t bring any magnets with me so my fridge remained uncovered.

Then a few weeks ago, some friends I know in Australia sent me a picture of their adorable newborn son. The picture was thoughtfully constructed with a small piece flexible magnet placed on the back of the photo. After looking at the picture, I decided it should be the very first item I put on my fridge. I then placed the photo onto the freezer portion of my fridge, removed my hand, and then watched as the photo gracefully fluttered onto my kitchen floor. It was then I realized my stainless steel fridge was not friendly to magnets.

With a little bit of investigation I found out my dishwasher and stove are magnet friendly but my fridge is not. Unfortunately, it’s not very practical to be putting items on your oven door and dishwasher. It was because of this I learned that some types of stainless steel are magnetic and other are not. And I learned something today.

I haven’t mentioned my leaky bathroom ceiling for a while but that’s not because it got fixed. In fact, my water damaged ceiling is virtually in the same condition it was two weeks ago. The reason for this is because no one was really sure what was going on upstairs in the apartment above. Rather than fix my ceiling without determining the root cause of the leak, the property management company wanted get all the facts known before proceeding. Given that my ceiling wasn’t actively dripping water and that the logic seemed pretty sound, I agreed to let the property management company do some investigating.

The aforementioned investigating is now done and repairs, I have been told, have been done. I was instructed to wait at least the weekend to see if my ceiling got any worse. It did not, so the next step is to finally get a contractor to fix the ceiling once and for all. Once that’s is done, you’ll get my final leaky ceiling update.

A few months ago, during the early part of April I wrote a post about people trying to fool other people. I’m not sure what they call that day exactly but anyways, one of the things I mentioned was the ThinkGeek web site that offered a fake product that was advertised as real. That fake product turned out be Tauntaun sleeping bag. While fake, geeks thought the ideal was awesome (me included) and basically demanded the real product be made.

Now months afterwards, which probably included legal negotiating with Lucasfilm, ThinkGeek is ready to offer the real thing. It will retail for $100 USD which I guess is kinda pricey for a novelty sleeping bag but it still emanates awesome to me. Check out these product features:

– Classic Star Wars sleeping bag simulates the warmth of a Tauntaun carcass– Built-in embroidered Tauntaun head pillow– Great for playing pretend “Save Luke from the Wampa” games– Teach your children about the best Star Wars movie ever